The only current way to comply with EU law, the judgment indicates, is to keep EU data within the EU. Whether those data can be safely managed within facilities run by US companies will not be determined until the US rules on an ongoing Microsoft case.
Microsoft stands in contempt of court right now for refusing to hand over to US authorities, emails held in its Irish data centre. This case will surely go to the Supreme Court and will be an extremely important determination for the cloud business, and any company or individual using data centre storage. If Microsoft loses, US multinationals will be left scrambling to somehow, legally firewall off their EU-based data centres from US government reach.

In this post, we’re going to take a deeper dive into the architectural concepts underlying cluster computing using container management frameworks such as ECS. We will show how these frameworks effectively abstract the low-level resources such as CPU, memory, and storage, allowing for highly efficient usage of the nodes in a compute cluster. Building on some of the concepts detailed in the earlier posts, we will discover why containers are such a good fit for this type of abstraction, and how the Amazon EC2 Container Service fits into the larger ecosystem of cluster management frameworks.

Alibaba’s cloud platform already competes with the likes of AWS in China. Aliyun’s Chinese data centers are in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. “For the time being, we are just testing the water,” Yu said today. That means Aliyun will focus first on Chinese companies doing business in the US. “We know well what Chinese clients need, and now it’s time for us to learn what US clients need,” he added.

'turns a fresh cloud computer into a working mail server. You get contact synchronization, spam filtering, and so on. On your phone, you can use apps like K-9 Mail and CardDAV-Sync free beta to sync your email and contacts between your phone and your box.'

Oh, very neat. New micro, small, and medium-class instances with burstable CPU scaling:

The T2 instances are built around a processing allocation model that provides you a generous, assured baseline amount of processing power coupled with the ability to automatically and transparently scale up to a full core when you need more compute power. Your ability to burst is based on the concept of "CPU Credits" that you accumulate during quiet periods and spend when things get busy. You can provision an instance of modest size and cost and still have more than adequate compute power in reserve to handle peak demands for compute power.

The aim of the docker plugin is to be able to use a docker host to dynamically provision a slave, run a single build, then tear-down that slave. Optionally, the container can be committed, so that (for example) manual QA could be performed by the container being imported into a local docker provider, and run from there.

TorMail was a Tor-based webmail system, and apparently its drives have been imaged and seized by the FBI. More info on the Freedom Hosting seizure:

The connection, if any, between the FBI obtaining Freedom Hosting’s data and apparently launching the malware campaign through TorMail and the other sites isn’t spelled out in the new document. The bureau could have had the cooperation of the French hosting company that Marques leased his servers from. Or it might have set up its own Tor hidden services using the private keys obtained from the seizure, which would allow it to adopt the same .onion addresses used by the original sites.

The French company also hasn’t been identified. But France’s largest hosting company, OVH, announced on July 29, in the middle of the FBI’s then-secret Freedom Hosting seizure, that it would no longer allow Tor software on its servers. A spokesman for the company says he can’t comment on specific cases, and declined to say whether Freedom Hosting was a customer. “Wherever the data center is located, we conduct our activities in conformity with applicable laws, and as a hosting company, we obey search warrants or disclosure orders,” OVH spokesman Benjamin Bongoat told WIRED. “This is all we can say as we usually don’t make any comments on hot topics.”

Unintended consequences on US-focused governance of the internet and cloud computing:

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue. We can't fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don't see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.